Spousal abuse is a vigorously prosecuted crime in the United States, but spousal abandonment? Not so much. Although it’s still a crime to walk out on a spouse in most jurisdictions, seldom does a district attorney prosecute a runaway husband. This has not always been the case, as evident in these two, fascinating cases.
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In December 1918, the epic clash of forces known as World War I neared closure, but the domestic battle between the Guys of Detroit had reached a boiling point. For reasons known only to him, fifty-eight-year-old Willard T. Guy abandoned his partner of three decades ten days before Christmas 1918.
A native of Campbell County, Kentucky, Willard married fellow Kentuckian Irene S. Scott, who was two years his senior, on November 25, 1884. Three years later, Irene “Ina” Willard gave birth to a baby girl named Elvira. Tragedy struck the Guys the following May when nine-month-old Elvira died. They would have no more children.
After Elvira’s death, the Guys followed the throngs relocating to Detroit during the early days of the automobile age. Like many Detroiters, Willard went to work in the automotive industry as an electrician for the Maxwell Motor Company.
Around Thanksgiving 1918, the Guys celebrated their thirty-fourth wedding anniversary. Their special date, falling two weeks after the armistice that ended the bloodletting in Europe, coincided with a long-needed period of peace in Europe. But back across the Big Pond in Detroit, the fighting had intensified in the Guy residence. Perhaps Guy’s eye settled on a younger woman elsewhere; perhaps he had swallowed one too many comments by his nagging wife; maybe some cataclysmic argument led him to exit stage left; or, Irene caught Willard “cheating” with Rosy Palm and her five sisters (he is described as having “very hairy” hands and arms). For whatever reason, he left Irene high-and-dry.
In 1918, with relatively few work-place options open to women, “high-and-dry” meant destitution for many abandoned wives. Subsequently, authorities vigorously prosecuted spousal abandonment as a crime. Following Irene Guy’s complaint, Highland Park Police chief Charles W. Seymour had reward notices printed and sent to nearby jurisdictions in February 1919.
The text of Seymour’s wanted notice provides a hint that the rift in the Irene’s happily-ever-after was caused by another face in the mix: “He may be found living with some woman who is not his wife.”
The final line leaves little doubt as to the seriousness of Guy’s crime: “We are very anxious to locate this man and have him apprehended.”
It is uncertain whether Willard shuffled back to Irene with his tail between his legs or if Seymour’s men dragged him back in cuffs; what is certain is that he did in fact return, and she welcomed him, although not necessarily with open arms. Irene may have held a silent grudge, she may even have made his life a living hell, but she apparently forgave him. The couple lived together at 194 Farrand in Highland Park for another fifteen years until Willard’s death of heart failure in August 1933. He was interred at Grand Lawn Cemetery in Detroit.
Their second split didn’t last long.
The quarrelsome couple was destined to be together both in life and in death. Four months after Willard’s death, Irene S. Guy followed her husband to the grave when she died of chronic myocarditis on December 10, 1933.
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Thirty years earlier in a State far, far away, a desperate housewife named Kate Pairot offered $50 for the capture of her deadbeat husband, J.B. She apparently wanted him badly, because she was willing to cough up a princely sum for his “apprehension and detention.”
A few weeks before Thanksgiving of 1888, J. B. walked away from his wife and her “three small children” in Golden City, Missouri–a tiny town that grew out of a stage coach stop in 1867.
To find J.B., Kate enlisted the help of the local justice of the peace, fifty-eight-year-old Captain Martin Breeden. The Captain was a heroic sort with an instinctive sense of justice and a bulldog’s tenacity that kept him alive throughout the carnage of the Civil War.
Born in Indiana in 1830, ten-year-old Martin Breeden moved west when his father, a shoemaker, decided to relocate to Missouri. Breeden farmed a sizable plot of 200 acres in Barton County a mile southwest of Golden City until the Civil War began. He enlisted on April 1, 1861, and served throughout the conflict. Breeden personally raised the 14th Missouri State Militia and attained the rank of captain.
After the war, he returned to his farm but devoted his energies to real estate speculation in Golden City and public service as the area’s justice of the peace. In November 1888, when Kate Pairot brought her complaint to him, Breeden was serving his fifth term.
To find J.B., Breeden printed up reward handbills with a lengthy description of the thirty-eight-year-old including an interesting anatomical detail: J.B. had a “felon” on a finger of his left hand. A fingertip felon is like a canker-sore for the hand and just as painful. It can be caused by either a viral or bacterial infection, and in some instances, can cause the finger to swell to enormous proportions. J.B. Pairot may have had just such a bulbous fingertip, because Breeden describes his finger as “considerably injured.”
Along with the reward leaflet, Breeden also included a photograph.
It is unclear if Captain Breeden ever managed to track down J. B. Pairot, who appears to have simply disappeared from the historical record.
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